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Agnes, in her slap-dash way, was a good housekeeper, and kept the pretty things well dusted. It was she who insisted on the strip of brown holland that led diagonally from the front door to the door of Herbert's study: boys' grubby feet should not go treading on her Indian square. It was she who always cleaned the picture-frames and washed the bust and the leaves of the palm.
What he meant was a lease, and as he got the item from a man who didn't know the difference, and as the boy stuck to it that the man had said lien and not lease, we did not charge that up to him. A few days later he wrote for a town photographer a paid local criticising someone who was going around the county peddling picture-frames and taking orders for enlarged pictures.
Because their eyes are lifted, they do not see the flotsam and jetsam of shattered stained glass, burnt woodwork, smashed benches, broken picture-frames and torn, rain-blurred portraits of lesser saints. They seem to think only of heaven. Though I'm not a Catholic, the chapel gave me such a sense of sacredness and benediction that I felt I must be there alone, if only for a moment.
In the worsted rosettes of the bell-ropes, in the plaster picture-frames, in the painted tea-tray and on the cups, in the pediment of the sideboard, in the ornament that crowns the barometer, in the finials of sofa and arm-chair, in the finger-plates of the "grained" door, is to be seen the ineffectual portrait or to be traced the stale inspiration of the flower.
Dilger's establishment, which was a dirty, dusty little place in a back street, with a few deplorable old chairs, rickety washstands, and rusty fenders outside, and the interior almost completely blocked by piles of dingy mattresses, empty clock-cases, tarnished and cracked mirrors, broken lamps, damaged picture-frames, and everything else which one would imagine could have no possible value for any human being.
"I was afraid you were painting for the Royal Academy." "Oh, no," answered Whistler; "they do not want masterpieces there, but some of their picture-frames are exquisite and really worth bus-fare to look at." Walking in the Champs-Elysées in Paris one morning, Whistler heard one Englishman say to another: "See that chap over there?" "What? That chap with the long hair and spindle legs?"
The Mistress, in a pretty little breakfast-cap, is moving about the room with a feather-duster, whisking invisible dust from the picture-frames, and talking with the Parson, who has just come in, and is thawing the snow from his boots on the hearth.
He went up a great many flights of stairs, and he noticed, as he had very seldom noticed, how the carpet became steadily shabbier, until it ceased altogether, how the walls were discolored, sometimes by cascades of damp, and sometimes by the outlines of picture-frames since removed, how the paper flapped loose at the corners, and a great flake of plaster had fallen from the ceiling.
Now he glanced familiarly at its white paneling, its sconces like silver candlesticks, the inevitable davenport inevitably backed by an amethyst-shaded piano lamp and a table crowded with silver boxes and picture-frames. He liked the winsomeness of light upon velvet and polished wood. It was not the drawing-room but the kitchen that dismayed him.
As I passed in Elevated trains across the end of street after street, and street after street, and saw so many of them just alike, and saw so many similar faces mysteriously peering in the same posture between the same curtains through the same windows of the same great houses; and saw canaries in cages, and enfeebled plants in pots, and bows of ribbon, and glints of picture-frames; and saw crowd after dense crowd fighting down on the cobbled roads for the fearful privilege of entering a surface-car I had, or seemed to have, a composite vision of the general life of the city.
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